London Court Grants Swedish Request to Extradite Assange

A British court on Thursday ordered Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, to be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual abuse. He has 7 days to appeal the ruling.

RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, must be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual abuse, a British court ordered Thursday. Mr. Assange immediately said he would appeal the decision.

Judge Howard Riddle took just over an hour to issue a sweeping dismissal of the defense team’s arguments — from arcane technical points to dark suggestions that Mr. Assange would not receive a fair trial in Sweden and might even face extradition to the United States, imprisonment at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison and possibly death.

The judge said that Mr. Assange appeared to have been “deliberately avoiding interrogation” when he left Sweden in September in the wake of allegations by two women in Stockholm that he had sexually abused them. Under Sweden’s strict sexual-crimes laws, he is accused of two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of rape. His accusers, both WikiLeaks volunteers, have said that their sexual encounters with Mr. Assange started out as consensual but turned nonconsensual.

Under the circumstances, Judge Riddle said, Swedish prosecutors had every right to issue a warrant last December for his arrest and return.

Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was impassive but pale as the judgment was delivered. Outside the court, he described the decision as “a rubber-stamping process” and reiterated his determination to fight the decision.

The verdict signals a new phase in a battle in the British courts and the media against what Mr. Assange, his legal team and his celebrity supporters have portrayed as a conspiracy to stop WikiLeaks from exposing government and corporate secrets.

The case has been bitterly waged against the backdrop of the group’s highest-profile operation yet — the release of a quarter of a million confidential American diplomatic cables that became the basis of articles by news organizations worldwide, including The New York Times.

WikiLeaks supporters initially mobbed courthouses over the course of six acrimonious hearings, chanting, “We love you, Julian,” when Mr. Assange was denied bail as a flight risk and briefly jailed in December after defying a judge’s request to provide an address. At the hearing on Thursday, their number had dwindled to about a dozen.

Mr. Assange has said that the accusations are “incredible lies” and that leaked documents about the case, and comments from Swedish officials, precluded justice for him.

Judge Riddle said Thursday that if there had been abuses in Sweden, “the right place for these to be examined and remedied is in the Swedish trial system.”

The long and costly legal battle seems likely to continue for months, with Mr. Assange essentially confined to the country mansion of a wealthy friend as a condition of his bail.

Since the accusations surfaced, many of his closest colleagues have defected from WikiLeaks, and a dozen of them formed a rival Web site, OpenLeaks. The United States Justice Department, meanwhile, has subpoenaed Mr. Assange’s Twitter account as part of an investigation that could lead to espionage charges.

Though its infrastructure was essentially disabled by the defections, WikiLeaks has continued to post classified United States diplomatic cables from the cache it had already obtained. Documents on the opulent lifestyle of the family of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia were widely disseminated during the revolution that ousted Mr. Ben Ali and started a wave of protests in the Arab world.

Mr. Assange has told friends in Britain that he feared that extradition to Sweden would be a step toward prosecution on American soil for his work with WikiLeaks. But a former colleague said in an interview that he thought Mr. Assange’s concerns were more immediate.

The colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the OpenLeaks founders, told reporters last week that when Mr. Assange first heard about the sexual abuse allegations in late August, “he was not concerned about the United States.”

“He was very scared of going to prison in Sweden,” Mr. Domscheit-Berg said, “which he thought might happen.”

If Mr. Assange’s appeals fail and he is returned to Sweden, the country’s procedures will not allow him bail, and he will probably be jailed in the city of Gothenburg, the British court was told.

If convicted, he could receive a maximum sentence of four years.

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